Slashdot videos: Now with more Slashdot!

View

Discuss

Share

We've improved Slashdot's video section; now you can view our video interviews, product close-ups and site visits with all the usual Slashdot options to comment, share, etc. No more walled garden! It's a work in progress -- we hope you'll check it out (Learn more about the recent updates).

rbowen writes "The software that powers the SourceForge developer tools (SourceForge is owned by the same corporate overlords as Slashdot) has been submitted to the Apache Software Foundation Incubator. The SourceForge Blog reads: 'By submitting Allura to the Apache Incubator, we hope to draw an even wider community of developers who can advance the feature set and tailor the framework to their needs. With the flexibility and extensibility Allura allows, developers are free to use any number of the popular source code management tools, including: Git, SVN, or Mercurial. We are indeed willing to turn our own open source platform into a tool that everyone can use and extend, and we believe Apache is the best place to steward the process.'"

My opinion is as valid as yours ( I assume you've used both too, and that you don't have prejudice against any of them). I'm not saying I'm right, I'm saying I feel that GitHub is far superior -- for my needs.

Actually if you did own Geeknet stock now would be a very good time to sell if you think that the stock will tank. It is when a stock has already lost a lot of it's value that you would be glad you didn't own any, not right before it loses it's value.

If GeekNet does opt to sell SourceForge (and/. and Freecode), then ultimately this would be a good move to keep the Allura code out in the open [itworld.com]. In that sense, I think this is a very good plan to protect the code.

A long time ago, the sourceforge source code was open source. Then s/VA Linux/SourceForge/ and they closed up the source code. GNU forked it (savannah) while SourceForge Inc. went through any outside code contributions, requiring a copyright assignment or deleting it.

He's right. As an outsider looking in this move was made to stay relevant when everyone has moved on to github. The only thing sourceforge has over github is that it's open source. Everything else about it is horrible and has been for a very long time.

Same thing with Apache which is losing out to other servers such as nginx and cherokee. All these projects as well as the sourceforge site simply stopped innovating and bloated out while the majority of people moved on.

Even if that's true, I say the better for it! With the Apache Software name behind a project, OSS developers are more willing to bet their time investment into an ASF project than an OSS project released directly by a commercial vendor.

The ASF seems to have become the dumping ground of unloved commercial software.

May be, but only for project sponsors that are seeking to exit the project sponsorship.

Oracle chose ASF for various legal reasons. APL was better suited to how Sun was using the OOorg code-base than GPL to start with, and Oracle realized that the community really doesn't like them, and that OOorg type software was not their strong point. ASF is a US organization, so it made it easy not just to get a tax write-off for the donation, but also easy to transfer legally as there were fewer laws to deal with.

Subversion moved to ASF as well; though I don't know the reasoning there, but the community transferred and has flourished just as much as it was under tigris.org.

SourceForge's though is a hub of open source software, and their website interface was originally GPL. They moved it to a pure Commercial several years back, at which point gForge, GNU Savannah, and a few others popped up and continued with the last GPL'd version. (Actually, I think gForge was around earlier, but kept in step with it.) They already provide a well respected hosting site for open source software; they've already had it under the GPL; so why hand it to ASF? Why not just put it back out under the GPL and host it again? Even going to the APL is not an issue for them hosting it on their own site, and ASF would mean an entirely different infrastructure. It makes no sense.

It makes sense to have the code stewarded outside of SourceForge, because it ensures that the development is completely open. We (SourceForge) value our projects' ability to own their own data, even if that means that they can move it somewhere else. By having Allura completely open, and even developed outside of SourceForge itself, we ensure that this right - the right to pack up and move - is 100% protected.

It also provides us access to innovation and ideas from outside of our own small organization, whic

It makes sense to have the code stewarded outside of SourceForge, because it ensures that the development is completely open. We (SourceForge) value our projects' ability to own their own data, even if that means that they can move it somewhere else. By having Allura completely open, and even developed outside of SourceForge itself, we ensure that this right - the right to pack up and move - is 100% protected.

You do realize that SF essentially had that until they turned to a closed development model, don't you?

Perhaps the bigger issue is that SF is no longer making as much money from that closed model as they were due to the maturing and backing of gForge, Savannah, and others, so now they're trying to get back in the good graces of the community. Somehow, I'm not sure it's going to work.

And, BTW, I fully support Oracle moving OOorg to Apache. It was the right thing to do. But I'm still baffled at why SF n